[ta1234567890]

What is Docusaurus? It is not very clear from the announcement nor from docusaurus’ homepage. Would love an explanation from someone who uses it. Thank you.

[ricopags]

It is a simple markdown-and-folder-structure based react app with PRPL that increasingly powers most of the high quality docs pages you see. For example:

https://developers.cloudflare.com/ https://reactnative.dev/docs/getting-started

more:

https://docusaurus.io/showcase/

[gnat]

Excellent short answer. What's PRPL? (Google tells me it's a furniture company or an embedded systems foundation, neither of which make sense in this context)

[PaulWaldman]

Push, Render, Pre-Cahce, and Load. It was coined by the Google Chrome team has a framework for making pages load faster.

https://web.dev/apply-instant-loading-with-prpl/

[nindalf]

How does it compare with say, mdbook?

[qbasic_forever]

Some good info here: https://docusaurus.io/docs/#comparison-with-other-tools

It's the same general wheelhouse of documentation tools as mdbook, i.e. take a pile of markdown and produce high quality documentation. One of the standout features of Docusaurus is that it's based on React so it builds a SPA for your documentation (while still being good about pre-rendering, etc. for good SEO). If you load up a Docusaurus site and start clicking around to read docs it feels like a native app without clunky refreshes, etc. It's very extensible and can be turned into very custom and slick documentation portals.

It also supports MDX which is a a version of markdown that embeds React controls and allows interesting client-side interactivity in your documents. This is very handy for frontend libraries and tools which typically have a showcase or component library which you can interact directly from the docs.

[pbowyer]

It'd be great if the Docusaurus team added mdBook and Bookdown to their comparison, with an emphasis on code example execution or including code from larger programs. I find that feature of mdBook invaluable (its marker-approach makes documenting how a library works very easy, and keeps the code examples up-to-date as the library evolves) and Bookdown's include code & its output is also good.

Just a shame one package doesn't include every one of these features.

[slorber]

Do you have a link to these features? I believe we somehow support those already.

It's be complicated for us to provide a deep comparisons with every single existing doc tool. I've never used mdBook myself.

[pbowyer]

Sure. Here's mdBook's code embedding: https://rust-lang.github.io/mdBook/format/mdbook.html

Bookdown/rMarkdown/Knitr is best explained at https://rmarkdown.rstudio.com/articles_intro.html#knitr-for-... and the user docs are at https://bookdown.org/yihui/rmarkdown/r-code.html and https://bookdown.org/yihui/rmarkdown/language-engines.html.

I like being able to test that the code in my documentation is valid and runs, and to show the output without having to copy and paste it.

Hope htat's useful!

When I looked at Docusaurus I had the impression it would work very well for JavaScript projects where you could runt he code in-browser, but wasn't designed to document other language code?

[swiley]

Oh man! An SPA for viewing pages!

[mynegation]

Started as a kind of static site generator in v1 but transitioned to JAMstack (SPA calling to the API) oriented towards creating documentation sites from Markdown. It’s from Facebook so uses React components extensively.